The first music video to show skateboarding on MTV, that made it into heavy rotation, was not some punk band. It was Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers, good old American rock n'roll at its finest. I think 7691 Muholland is where the skate shoot took place. There's a house there now, but there's a scenic overlook turnout real close by to get a similar view.
In 1989, I had become the official cameraman for Unreel Productions the video production company owned by Vision Skateboards and Vision Street Wear clothes. All of our producers and tech guys were actually cameramen, and had more experience than me. But they shot footage only at a couple of large shoots, mostly in the early days of the company. In '89, I was the guy who traveled to all the 2-Hip King of Vert and Meet the Street contests with one of our $50,000, 35 pound, Sony Betacam, cameras. Shooting bike video all day was a workout back then. Someone else, Don Hoffman, I think, traveled to the NSA skate comps that year. Skateboarding was still riding high on the 1980's wave of popularity, and times were good at Vision, going into 1989.
I showed up to work one morning at our office in Costa Mesa, and someone said, "Oh, you're going to Tom Petty today." My reply was, "Huh?" Everyone seemed to know, but I didn't find out until that morning. Some Vision skaters were going to appear in a Tom Petty music video, and my job was to hang out all day, and just shoot behind the scenes footage for the Vision archives. I was given an address on Muholland Drive, way up in the Hollywood Hills (technically Studio City hills). I checked out a betacam to make sure it was in good shape, grabbed a couple of batteries, and took a little S-VHS camera, packed them in Unreel's trusty little Toyota van, and headed up to Hollywood.
By that time, I was one with the Thomas Guide map book, and I found the address easily, mostly because the Vision dually pick-up, and our trailer mounted mini-,were there already. Aptly named for the day, "Hollywood" Mike Miranda, the BMX team manager for Vision, was driving that rig. The address was a driveway right below another driveway, which led to one of those houses on the side of the hills.
For those who don't know, Muholland Drive, mentioned in the song "Freefallin'," it runs near the top of a ridge from the Cahuenga Pass, right above the Hollywood Bowl, to Bel Air, about 14 miles away. It's a long, twisty, mountain-like, two lane road, with lots of multi-million dollar mansions off of it. It's not a place you really want to take a dually pulling a 26 foot long halfpipe trailer. I followed Mike, walking down the driveway, checking it out, to make sure the trailer would make it, and to see if we could turn around at the end. The driveway was literally carved on the side of the hill, steep uphill on one side, huge drop downhill for 100 or more feet on the other. Much to our surprise, the skinny driveway led to a large, flat grassy area, probably half an acre in size. There was plenty of room to turn around. So Mike drove the rig down to the site, as I walked along, making sure the trailer wasn't going off the edge on the tight turns.
The lot was a really cool location, with views of Universal Studios below, and the San Fernando Valley spreading off the the left. Mike centered the trailer in the area, not far from the edge, in what seemed like a really good position. The 6 foot high, wooden, mini-ramp closed up like a clam shell for traveling. Then we started the process of lowering the sides, putting wood under the legs, and leveling the whole thing to make it stable and skateable. The first couple women from the actual video crew, two of the producers, showed up as we were doing that. In typical Hollywood fashion, we got the ramp all set up, and Mike pulled his bike out and rolled around it, to see how stable it felt. Just then the director, Julien Temple, showed up. He looked at the ramp, walked around it for about a minute, and then said, "Can you move the ramp a foot that way?" and pointed to his right. Mike wanted to kill him, and I thought, "This guy's a fuckin' idiot." So Mike Miranda and I spent the next half an hour closing the ramp part way, moving the whole thing a fucking foot, and setting it all back up again. As we were doing that, the grip trucks and other production people showed up, and filled in the lot around us.
After that sketchy start, things were pretty chill. I parked the Unreel van up on the side of Muholland Drive, where a long line of other worker vehicles were parked. Since I was supposed to be inconspicuous, I used the smaller, prosumer S-VHS camera, to wander around, and shoot behind the scenes footage all day. Mostly I just kept grabbing the free food from the Craft Service table, which is the free snack bar on any major TV or movie set.
The skaters found there way up there, and donned Vision Street Wear clothes. Heather, who designed the Vision women's clothes, played wardrobe woman, and decked out the models in as much "Vision Slut Wear (as us Vision people usually called it) as possible. That was part of the deal. The music video people got to use our ramp and skaters, and we (Vision) got a ton of "product placement," meaning Vision Skateboards and VSW clothes showing up in a major music video that millions of people would see.
At the time, skateboarding hardly every showed up on TV. At all. Unreel tried to sell ESPN on an action sports TV series of six shows, and the suits at ESPN in 1989 replied, "No one wants to watch skateboarding on TV, and what the hell is snowboarding?" Really, that's what they told my boss in. Unreel ended up syndicating the series, and it got really good ratings for an unknown series that year. Things at Vision went downhill fast in late 1989 and 1990, so there was no attempt to syndicate the next year. Obviously ESPN came around, six years later, and started the Extreme Games in 1995, changing the name to the X-Games in 1996.
But on that day in 1989, it was Vision skaters Kele Rosecrans, Joe Johnson, and Eric Nash, doing their thing on the mini ramp. Another thing, mini-ramps were a brand new type of ramp then. It was only a year or two earlier that Paul Schmitt, and some of his skaters, were forced by the city of Costa Mesa to cut down their 9 foot high, vert, backyard halfpipe, to a six foot, undervert ramp, due to city code violations. Known as the Town Street Ramp, and located a couple blocks from Vision HQ, that was the birth of the mini-ramp. They soon found that you could have a lot of fun on a smaller, undervert ramp, and backyard mini-ramps began to pop up nationwide soon after.
The star of the music video, the young blond woman, was named Devin, as I recall. She didn't skate, but was a good surfer. The skaters were more than happy to grab her hips and push her back and forth on the ramp, helping her learn to skate it. Within an hour, she could fakie nearly up to the top in both directions. She picked it up really quick, which surprised us all. She was actually really cool, and the skaters spent most of their day skating, and making friends with the models.
If you watch the video, you'll see a couple of shots, with another woman in a white top, on the deck of the ramp. That's Miki Keller, who was the Sims Snowboard assistant manager at the time. Miki was one of maybe two or three women who could actually skate a mini-ramp then. She did skate during the shoot, but the director left that footage out, which bummed out Miki of course. She went on to work at Morrow Snowboards for years, and later brought women's motocross back to life, starting a whole race series. Miki is an action sports legend in her own right, and Julien Temple missed out by not giving her a little screen time.
A couple hours into our day up on that set, Tom Petty showed up. He's the star, and didn't have to be there until everything was set up and ready to go. Now while TV and movies and music videos sound really cool and glamorous to most people, in reality, shooting film is really boring most of the time. The would set up the cameras at one angle, play the song over and over as Tom lip-synched for the film, and would do several takes of that shot. Then they'd set up the cameras for another shot, and do that several times. So film making is a whole lot of "hurry up and wait." Most of the time, most of the crew is just hanging out, waiting for the next time they're needed.
For me and Mike Miranda, it was a chill as could be. Mike just had to be there to take the ramp down, and I had to shoot some cool footage every 15-20 minutes, and try to not run out of camera batteries. So mostly we hung out, ate free food and soft drinks, and made fun of the director.
At one point, during the down time, Tom Petty was pushing his daughter back and forth on the camera dolly. The grips set down little train tracks, and the dolly is a rolling vehicle that can move the camera up and down, while being pushed back and forth along the tracks. I decided that would be a good time to get a shot of Tom just hanging out. I shot some footage for maybe 30 seconds, as Tom was just being a dad, pushing his daughter, who was 8 or 9, I think, back and forth. He saw me shooting, and looked over. With a smerk he said, "We want royalties on that video." He wasn't being mean, he didn't flip out, he just didn't know who I was, or why I was shooting video. He smiled, and I put the camera down. He nodded. That was about the coolest way to say, "Hey, do you mind not shooting this, I'm hanging out with my kid," as you could get on a film set. He smiled, and I wandered off to get another muffin from the Craft Service table.
It was a beautiful, cloudless, California day, and that's how I spent the day on the skateboard shoot of the "Freefallin'" set. The other locations were the Sherman Oaks Galleria, for the mall shots, and the funky little hot dog stand was at the corner of Ventura Boulevard and Beverly Glen, in Sherman Oaks. The hot dog stand is gone, and there's a Whole Foods supermarket there now. I'm not sure where they shot the backyard scene.
It was early evening, with the sun heading down, as we left that day. I wound up giving Kele and Eric a ride home after the shoot. And while I made a lot of fun of Julien Temple, because he really did come across as an idiot on set, the finished video was cool. AND it put skateboarding all over MTV for a few weeks, at a time when skateboarding rarely got on TV. Julien directed hundreds of music videos, and I haven't, so whatever his method is it worked.
After hanging out that day, and sort of meeting Tom Petty, I started listening to a lot more of his music. Doing that, I realized how much of a genius he was at writing really solid, timeless songs. From "Refugee" in 1980, to "Saving Grace" in 2006, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers put out 40 years of great music, with hit songs spanning 26 years. Their older songs never seem to get dated, he wrote about timeless things, and they just made damn good rock n' roll. My personal favorite Tom Petty songs, besides "Freefallin'," are "Don't come around here no more," "Runnin' down a dream," "Into the great wide open," and "Stop draggin' my heart around" with Stevie Nicks.
As for the skaters, Eric Nash is still killing it on vert. Here he is shredding the Van's park Combi Pool in about 2011. You can see more of Joe Johnson in this 1989 video, at 5:43. He was Tony Hawk's roommate, at the Fallbrook house, at the time. You can see more of Kele Rosecrans skating, also in 1989, in this video, at 14:46. And you can see what happened when I asked Kele about a thorn tree. You can see a bit of Miki Keller in this video, interviews with legends of women's snowboarding.
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